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Oedipus Bronx

THE NEW REGIME Hal (left) and Hank Steinbrenner at the Yankees spring-training site in Tampa, Fla.Credit
Jeff Riedel

Hank Steinbrenner was driving like he owned the place. “This thing’s got no pickup,” he said, gunning my midsize Hyundai down Steinbrenner Drive in Tampa, Fla. We had just finished lunch on a January afternoon at a Steinbrenner family favorite, an Italian restaurant called Iavarone’s, and were on our way back to his new office at Legends Field in my rental car, which Hank had insisted on driving. As we approached the ballpark, he steered the car up onto the curb, drove it on the main walkway, between the Yankees merchandise store and a small memorial park devoted to Yankee immortals, and came to a stop just a few feet from the tinted-glass door marked “Executive Offices.” “This is where I usually park,” Hank said, stepping out of the Hyundai and tossing me the keys.

Hank Steinbrenner, who will turn 51 next month, bears a disconcerting resemblance to his father, George M. Steinbrenner III. The square, pinched face, the broad shoulders, the barrel chest, even the tiny feet, are all unmistakably Steinbrenner. The outsize ring on one of his nicotine-stained fingers, however, was not a keepsake from one of the six World Series that the Yankees have won during the 35 years his father has owned the team. It was a miniature horse’s head embedded in a diamond-encrusted horseshoe.

Until recently, Hank worked in a kind of self-imposed exile on his family’s 730-acre horse farm in Ocala, Fla., the Kinsman Farm. It was a relatively stress-free, anonymous life that principally entailed attending races, spending his father’s millions at horse auctions and studying bloodlines to find suitable stallions to mate with the Steinbrenner mares. But last year, when his father’s heir apparent, Steve Swindal, was divorced from Hank’s sister Jennifer and forced out of his job as the chairman of Yankee Global Enterprises, things took a remarkable and unexpected turn for both the Steinbrenner children and professional baseball. Hank and his little brother, Hal, found themselves running the most famous and valuable franchise in American sports, the New York Yankees.

“It was a necessity,” Hank told me, referring to the takeover. “It was something we wanted to do, but it was a necessity as well. The bottom line is that this is a family business.” By now, we had taken the elevator up to the fourth floor and were sitting in Hank’s new and still unfinished office; the flat-screen TV had been mounted, but the private bathroom wasn’t yet operational. The picture windows offered a panoramic view of the Yankees’ spring-training diamond, Legends Field, which is being renamed George M. Steinbrenner Field.

While we were talking, Hal poked his head into Hank’s office to tell him the tailor was there to fit him for some new suits and overcoats he would need in New York. Hank rolled his eyes and excused himself for a few minutes to have his measurements taken.

Hal is apparently accustomed to playing the role of the more responsible son. Earlier in the day, I asked the two brothers about their respective experiences at the same military school. Hank told me that he had been something of a rebel, spending more than his share of time in study hall and on disciplinary probation. And Hal? “I learned pretty quickly what was expected of me,” he said, looking up from his BlackBerry. “He was a conformist,” Hank interjected.

When you’re in the same room as the two brothers, who are separated by more than 11 years, it’s almost impossible to ignore the Felix-Oscar comparison. Trim, in pressed chinos and a blue-and-white polo shirt, Hal is all wariness and restraint, every bit the conservative young businessman suggested by his 1994 M.B.A. For his part, Hank, with his proudly liberated gut and shopworn, untucked appearance, is clearly not one to hold himself back.

Once the season starts, the brothers will be regulars at the Regency Hotel, where they stay when they’re in New York, and in the owner’s box at Yankee Stadium. Hank has already plunged into his new job, in fact, and if he’s acting out of a sense of family obligation, he nonetheless seems to relish being the one whose opinion matters. During the off-season, he supplied an abundance of colorful quotes to the tabloids, including a parting short at the Yankees’ outgoing manager, Joe Torre. (“Where was Joe’s career in ’95 when my dad hired him?” he asked a reporter, rhetorically.) Hank, who is divorced and has four children, does not intend to be an absentee owner. “The truth of the matter is that as much as the players and managers want to win, no one wants to win more than myself and Hal and the rest of the family,” he told me. “It all starts at the top. So we should be making all of the final decisions, and we will.”

It’s true that the Yankees are a family business — and have been ever since George Steinbrenner bought the team from CBS in 1973 for $10 million. But they are also a perennial post-season favorite and a big-market Goliath, baseball’s annual leader in attendance and typically its biggest road draw. The team’s economic clout allows it to effectively set the game’s agenda, and when Steinbrenner Sr. was in his activist, win-now-and-at-all-costs mode, everyone knew exactly what to expect: regular raids on the team’s farm system, outrageous free-agent contracts and a lot of bloviating. But now that the 77-year-old Steinbrenner has either chosen to retire or been forced to by his failing health, it’s not clear how the club is likely to operate, much less who’s making the decisions for the organization.

As the Yankees enter their first full season under new leadership, it seems natural to wonder what the transition will mean for both the team and baseball. Succession is fraught with challenges for any business. Throw family dynamics into the mix and things only get trickier, as Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone, two aging patriarchs with children jockeying for control of their respective kingdoms, have recently reminded us.

In the realm of sports, an especially volatile enterprise, you don’t have to look beyond New York to see just how significantly generational succession can alter a team’s fortunes. Jeff Wilpon, the son of the owner of the Mets, took control of and revived the team several years ago, while James Dolan, the heir to the Knicks’ throne, was turning his family’s once-great franchise into a bottom-scraper and laughingstock.

For the Yankees, the ongoing succession is a lot more complicated than it was for either the Mets or the Knicks. The team is now in the hands of not one but two designated heirs, and one of the Steinbrenner sisters, Jennifer, will have a voice in the team’s operations, too, as will Felix Lopez, the second husband of the other sister, Jessica. “Like almost any family business with a patriarch and children, the long-term future of the Yankees will depend on the need to avoid sibling rivalries and other types of problems,” one of the team’s limited partners told me. “The question is going to be how they function as a family.”

On a cold, clear day in late January, I toured the future home of the New York Yankees with Lonn A. Trost, the team’s chief operating officer, and Jennifer Swindal Steinbrenner. At 48, Jennifer is the second-oldest of the Steinbrenner children, after Hank. Originally, I had expected to be shown around the new, partly built stadium by her younger brother, Hal, but he came down with the flu. It’s a sign of how eager the Yankee organization is to present a unified family front — and how fuzzy all of the roles within the club are to outsiders — that the team simply substituted one Steinbrenner for another.

A self-professed chauvinist, Steinbrenner Sr. apparently never considered putting either one of his daughters in charge of the Yankees. But both of their husbands were once widely considered to be heirs apparent to George. (For that matter, long before they took over last year, both Hank and Hal were at different times seen as probable successors as well.) Before Lopez, Jessica, who is in her mid-40s, was married to Joseph Molloy, who served briefly as the team’s general partner when Steinbrenner was banned from baseball in the early 1990s. (Molloy is now a physical-education teacher at a middle school in Tampa; Jessica keeps an office at Legends Field but devotes most of her time to the family’s horses.) Then last February, on the morning after Valentine’s Day, Steve Swindal was arrested on charges of drunk driving in Florida; less than six weeks later, Jennifer filed for divorce.

It was a messy affair, but the excommunication of Steve Swindal created job opportunities at the upper levels of the organization, and the subsequent transfer of power to the Steinbrenner children freed Jennifer to become more involved with the team’s operations. Formerly a full-time mom, she now has an office at the Yankees’ facility in Tampa and is a general partner of the club, with a particular focus on the new ballpark in the Bronx. When we spoke by phone a couple of weeks before meeting at the new stadium site, Jennifer avoided discussing the change in management caused by her ex-husband’s departure. Instead, she dismissed her tabloid divorce, and the resulting upheaval within the Yankees, with peppy spin. “It couldn’t have been scripted any better,” she told me.

Jennifer had flown into New York via Chapel Hill, where her daughter, a senior at the University of North Carolina, was performing in “Sweeney Todd.” She was here to check on the progress at the stadium and meet with the developer, Tishman Speyer, about the models for some of its 50-plus luxury suites, which prospective renters will be able to see by appointment this summer at the developer’s Rockefeller Center offices.

The new stadium is the crowning achievement of George Steinbrenner’s 35-year reign as the principal owner of the Yankees. Steinbrenner badgered the city for it for years, using the threat of a move to New Jersey as his favorite cudgel. The two sides finally reached a deal a few years ago, and the ballpark is supposed to be ready in time for the 2009 season. Who knows whether Steinbrenner will spend much, if any, time there? But even if he doesn’t, the ballpark — the House that George Built — will be his legacy, and it’s going to be up to his children to ensure that it thrives.

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SAFE PLAY
Both sides bluffed, but in the end, the Yankees agreed to pay Alex Rodriguez hundreds of millions of dollars  while hoping he can earn them even more in return.Credit
Jim McIsaac/Getty Images

If the stadium’s exterior, with its limestone and granite façade, is self-consciously retro, the interior will be thoroughly modern. Trost might as well have been talking about a new themed hotel in Las Vegas as he described what would become of one drafty concrete chamber after another: the New York Yankees martini bar, a steakhouse (NYY Steak), a grill room, a Yankees museum, a year-round banquet hall and a conference center. The team’s interlocking “NY” logo will be everywhere, from the door handles to the latticework. Lining the so-called Great Hall that runs from home plate to the right-field foul pole will be huge two-sided banners, with Yankee legends in black-and-white on one side and more recent superstars in color on the other. The Yankees are eight years removed from their last world championship, but it’s hard not to regard the new stadium, with its over-the-top evocation of Yankee mythology, as an in-your-face assertion of Yankee might, a pointed and — depending on your perspective — either desperate or reassuring reminder that the team is less a baseball club than an American institution. It will be Red Sox Nation’s version of hell.

The field, now covered in heavy machinery, will be identical to the team’s existing one, save for two small but significant details: the rain tarp will be moved from the first-base side of the field to the third-base side so that Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter, the Yankees’ two most valuable assets, will have something soft to land on when they dive after foul balls, and the distance between home plate and the backstop will be reduced by 20 feet, so the seats will be closer to the field.

“Isn’t it thrilling?” gushed Jennifer, who was gamely navigating the construction site in a black fur-lined coat, high-heeled boots and a Yankees hard hat. “My dream is to own a little apartment over there,” she said, pointing at the tenement across the street from the main entrance to the new ballpark. “That way I’d only have to cross the street to get to the stadium.”

The new stadium is also of special interest to Hal, who has spent the last decade or so developing hotels both for the family real estate business and on his own. Before the unexpected rise of Steve Swindal, most Yankee insiders considered Hal the front-runner to take over the franchise one day. He certainly had the right pedigree. Unlike Hank, who graduated from Central Methodist University in Fayette, Mo., Hal followed in his father’s footsteps at Williams College. During his senior year — and with his father’s blessing — Hal cooperated with a profile in Newsday headlined “Heir Apparent.” In 2004, in his last extensive interview, Steinbrenner Sr. told a writer for Sports Illustrated that Hank didn’t understand him, but that he was “very proud of Hal.”

I met Hal for the first time in the executive offices of a deserted Yankee Stadium in the middle of December. A young-looking 39, he has the permanently crenellated hair of his father, whom he refers to as George. This makes a certain kind of sense. He never really knew his dad before he was George Steinbrenner.

Unlike Hank, who kept his distance from his father for most of his adult life, Hal seems to have long taken it for granted that he was going to do whatever his father wanted him to. “That was always going to be up to George, obviously,” he said when I asked him what sort of role he had envisioned with the Yankees. “I just made sure that I was there at Legends Field three or four days a week, and if they needed me for anything, I was there.” Hal’s first tour of duty with the team came just after his graduation from Williams in 1991. At the time, George was suspended from baseball, but he wanted his younger son to learn the family business and instructed the team’s chief operating officer at the time, David Sussman, to take him under his wing.

It was a bad time for baseball. The league was just beginning to grapple in earnest with the effects of free agency, and the emerging class system of haves (the teams that could afford to compete for high-priced superstars) and have-nots (those that couldn’t) was causing considerable bitterness between the owners of big-market and small-market teams. Many owners were pushing for a salary cap to address the inequity, planting the seeds for the labor unrest that would come to a head with the strike in 1994. In this hostile climate, Sussman recalls, Hal was by no means convinced that it made sense for the Steinbrenner family to hold onto the Yankees.

George Steinbrenner returned to Yankee Stadium for the 1993 season. Such was his imperiousness — the sportswriter Red Smith once called him “the Führer of the Yankees” — that even a dutiful son like Hal had trouble working for him. “Even when he gave you apparent authority to make a decision, there was a lot of second-guessing,” Hal told me, characterizing his father’s famously abusive management style as diplomatically as possible.

Hal has a guarded, serious manner. He almost never talks to the media, and when he does he reveals as little about himself, his family or the Yankees as possible. He opened our first interview by announcing that he wasn’t going to discuss his father’s health or the specifics of the team’s finances. Later, when I asked him how old his daughters are — he is divorced and has three children, all girls — he declined to answer: “Let’s just say they’re all under 10 and leave it at that.”

And yet Hal may not be entirely immune to the allure of attention. When he saw me in Tampa a few weeks after our first meeting in the Bronx and realized that I had spent the better part of the day with Hank, he seemed surprised, maybe even a bit jealous: “I hope there’s going to be some personal stuff about me in the story, too.” Then, perhaps having thought better of his reaction, he quickly added: “I just want to get a date out of it.”

Following his apprenticeship in the Bronx, Hal went to business school at the University of Florida and soon immersed himself in the family’s hotel business. He lived in Tampa, kept an office directly next to his father’s at Legends Field and periodically got involved with the Yankees before again disappearing into the hotels when he ran out of the patience required for dealing with George.

Hal is now the chairman of Yankee Global Enterprises — a title formerly held by Steve Swindal — which on paper places him a rung above Hank, a senior vice president of the Yankees, but both brothers describe themselves as equal partners. There seems to be no formal arrangement, though they say the plan is for Hal to defer to Hank on baseball-related issues and for Hal to have final say on business decisions. But Hank’s high profile — and Hal’s near invisibility — during the off-season has clearly created the perception that Hank is the one in charge.

The reality is that it’s hard to know exactly who’s in charge. Not even the team’s 20-odd limited partners, who together own a little under half of the team, seem clear about the new distribution of power. “I think there’s some constructive ambiguity in terms of how things have been situated,” one of them told me. “The attitude seems to be, Let’s see how things work out before making any final judgments.”

The ongoing steroids scandal notwithstanding, the game that Hal and his siblings are now diving into on a full-time basis is as healthy as it has ever been. There’s still some bitterness between big-market and small-market teams, but mandatory revenue-sharing and the luxury tax have redistributed some of the wealth and given the have-nots less cause to complain. What’s more, many small-market teams have managed to adapt and find ways to still remain competitive. The game’s popularity is soaring; Major League Baseball’s attendance record is broken anew every year.

The team Hal is returning to is, of course, significantly different as well. After an 18-year drought, the Yankees won the World Series four times between 1996 and 2000. On the back of that dynasty a towering international conglomerate was built. “The Yankees today are an entertainment company with a baseball team at its core,” Randy Levine, the team’s president, told me recently, ticking off some of the club’s less visible businesses, including its memorabilia company, Yankees-Steiner Collectibles, which sells players’ game-used uniforms and gear, and its partnership with the Japanese media company Yomiuri Shimbun, the owner of the Yomiuri Giants.

Without question, the most valuable piece of the Yankees’ empire is its cable channel, YES, which the Yankees started in 2002. Now the most-watched regional sports network in the country, the YES network enjoys all of the upside of the team’s soaring payroll and none of the downside. The bulk of its viewers represent a prized and notoriously difficult-to-reach demographic, men between the ages of 18 and 49, making it an appealing venue for advertisers. And because the network broadcasts almost all of the Yankees’ regular-season games and has extensive access to players and coaches, it’s a must-have channel for local satellite and cable providers, which pay steep fees for the right to carry it. Last summer, when Goldman Sachs was shopping around its approximately 40 percent stake in YES, the network was valued at around $3 billion. According to Forbes magazine, the team itself isn’t worth half that.

But as Yankee Global Enterprises continues to grow and expand, so too does the importance of the team’s continued success, upon which the entire empire is built. Remaining competitive year in and year out requires an ever-escalating payroll; to subsidize that payroll, the Yankees need to keep increasing their revenues. This off-season, when Alex Rodriguez had the opportunity to opt out of his contract, the Yankees pretty much couldn’t afford not to re-sign him, both from a business perspective and a baseball one. Not only is he the best player in the game, he will also be an unrivaled draw for the new ballpark as he presumably chases a variety of baseball milestones. (Under his new contract, A-Rod and the Yankees will share the marketing revenue of his

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FIELD OF REVENUES The Yankees new stadium, opening in 2009, which the team needs in order to make more money to pay for the stars that are needed to pay for the new stadium.Credit
The New York Yankees/Associated Press

historic achievements.) A-Rod will single-handedly boost the value of YES too, perhaps by as much as $100 million, according to Vince Gennaro, a financial consultant to a number of big-league teams; he predicts that A-Rod could generate roughly $450 million for the Yankees over the course of his 10-year contract.

That’s assuming a lot, though. A-Rod may be as close as you can get to a sure thing in baseball, but he and his contract nevertheless represent a big gamble for the Yankees. The club puts the total value of his deal at $275 million, plus an extra $30 million if he breaks Barry Bonds’s home-run record. But the Yankees will almost certainly exceed the luxury-tax threshold for the duration of his time with the team (and the rest of eternity, for that matter), which means that they’ll have to pay an extra 40 cents for every dollar A-Rod earns. Thus, he’ll cost the team on the order of $427 million. Needless to say, if Rodriguez underperforms, becomes deeply unpopular or — the real nightmare scenario — gets hurt, the failure will be considerable.

The organization’s handling of A-Rod last year provides a glimpse of what the new regime may mean for the Yankees. Throughout the season, Rodriguez’s agent, Scott Boras, and the team’s general manager, Brian Cashman, tried to reach an agreement on a new deal, with Cashman making it clear that if Rodriguez opted out the Yankees would not pursue him as a free agent. Boras and Rodriguez called the Yankees’ bluff during the World Series; player and team seemed to have parted ways. “We’re not going to back down,” Hank said at the time. “It’s goodbye.”

But several days later, Rodriguez called Hank directly, going around both Boras and Cashman, and the Yankees did back down. In an effort to save face, Hank went out of his way to cast A-Rod, not exactly a hayseed, as an almost unwitting dupe of Boras — “He sounded shellshocked,” Hank told me, “like he didn’t know what was going on” — and suggested that he, personally, had helped bring Rodriguez around by lecturing him on the majesty of the pinstripes. Hank may have salvaged some pride by cultivating the impression that A-Rod crawled back to the Yankees on his knees, but it came at a cost: the public humiliation of a player to whom the team had just committed hundreds of millions of dollars.

For the Yankees, the new, $1.2 billion stadium is an even higher-stakes bet than A-Rod. Unlike football, baseball is a local business; financially, teams depend heavily on regional fan support. Apart from vanity, George Steinbrenner had a very simple reason for wanting a new ballpark: the Yankees have maxed out their revenue potential in the current one.

The new stadium certainly promises to be a giant ATM. Its seating capacity is a little less than that of the existing stadium — it will seat just under 51,000, down from 57,500 — but fewer seats means greater demand, and greater demand means higher ticket prices. There will also be many more opportunities to spend money inside the ballpark. Four times as much space will be devoted to retail shops — 12,000 square feet compared to 3,000 — and instead of empty, blacked-out center-field bleachers, there will be a massive sports bar. The existing stadium has 19 high-priced luxury suites; the new stadium will have 51 higher-priced luxury suites as well as 8 separate “party suites” that together can accommodate more than 400 people.

During my tour of the stadium, Trost stressed that a trip to the ballpark would still be affordable to the average Yankee fan. “The luxury suites will bear the brunt of the price increases,” he told me. “They’ll subsidize Joe Fan.” If this is true, it’s also a bit misleading. The suites, which will run from $600,000 to $850,000 per year, are certainly priced exorbitantly, but the average ticket is also rising, with roughly half the seats costing more than $45. No doubt it’s a price that Joe Fan will be more than happy to pay — as long as the Yankees are winning. “The hiccup of not making the post-season in a given year is going to have a pretty devastating effect on the Yankees,” Gennaro told me. “By 2010, the new-stadium halo will be worn off, and people are going to be there stomping their feet saying, ‘Show me a winner.’ ”

The stomping of feet is, of course, what George Steinbrenner did so publicly for so long, and if he didn’t give New York a champion every year, he certainly came a lot closer than any other baseball owner. That responsibility will now rest principally with Hank, apparently the final authority on the team’s baseball decisions.

Hank’s sudden and forceful emergence during the 2007-8 off-season took a lot of people by surprise, given his long history of ambivalence toward his father’s most cherished business. Hank went straight into horse racing after graduating from Central Methodist in 1980, with no immediate intention of working for the Yankees. “There was never any doubt in my mind about what I was going to do — horses,” Hank told me. Five years later, though, his plans temporarily changed when his father asked him to serve what would become an ill-fated apprenticeship in the Bronx.

The Yankees were struggling at the time — the 1980s would be the first decade since the 1910s in which the Yankees failed to win a World Series — and Steinbrenner Sr. was perpetually raging at his staff. No one was immune from his spleen-venting rants, least of all his son. The beat reporters noticed that Hank had a facial tic — a twitch in one of his eyes — that came and went depending on whether his father was around. He lasted less than two seasons before retreating to Ocala. “Overall, my father was a great dad, but as a boss he was a real pain in the ass,” Hank said when I asked him about his brief time with the team.

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Several years later, in 1990, when Steinbrenner Sr. was suspended from baseball for paying a shady figure named Howard Spira $40,000 to dig up dirt on the team’s underperforming slugger Dave Winfield, he asked his oldest son to come back and replace him as the club’s general partner. Hank, who in addition to his work on the stud farm was now coaching a high-school soccer team in Ocala, initially agreed. Then he changed his mind. “I agonized about it for two weeks,” he told me. “But I knew the ban was never going to last. The Yankees were a dictatorship. No matter who took the title, my dad was still going to be the boss.”

Yet Hank, who continued to work with the family’s horses, didn’t exactly strike out on his own. When he and I were sitting in his office at Legends Field, I noticed a small racecar with the Yankees “NY” emblazoned on its tail fin sitting on his desk. Hank told me it was a replica of a dragster that he had persuaded his father to sponsor for the driver Darrell Gwynn in 2000. “It could have been a good business, if we’d stuck with it,” Hank said. Gwynn, who still has warm feelings toward Hank, told me later that Steinbrenner Sr. repeatedly summoned him to Tampa to chew him out for not winning more races, and then stopped making payments on their three-year, $10 million contract after a little more than a year. Gwynn said that Hank would occasionally try to defend his performance and even stormed out of a couple of their meetings in frustration, but that at the end of the day he didn’t stop his father from breaking the contract.

It’s hard not to consider Hank’s relationship with his father in Oedipal terms. He is fiercely loyal to his father, as demonstrated by his published comments about Joe Torre, and at times Hank has sounded a lot like George Steinbrenner, circa 1980, perhaps most noticeably in his spiteful public treatment of A-Rod. (Steinbrenner Sr. once described his disappointing, high-priced Japanese pitcher Hideki Irabu to a reporter as a “fat pus-sy toad.”) “You look at what Hank says and how he’s conducting himself and you get the impression that he’s trying too hard to be George,” said one of the team’s limited partners, who did not want to be identified because he was wary of speculating publicly about the family.

At the same time, though, Hank seems eager to escape his father’s long shadow. During our day together in Tampa, he repeatedly criticized his dad for any number of things, from his insatiable appetite for celebrity to his lack of patience with the Yankee farm system to his treatment of his employees. “Hank is the pariah who’s come home with something to prove to his old man, even if his old man is not going to be around to see it,” says one former business associate of Steinbrenner Sr.

That may be stretching the point, but Hank certainly knows what happened when his grandfather, an intercollegiate hurdles champion who graduated at the top of his class at M.I.T., decided to retire from his family business, a Midwestern shipping company called Kinsman Marine. Henry Steinbrenner told his oldest child and only son, George, that if he wanted to take over the company he could borrow the necessary capital to buy it from him and the other principal stockholders. Eager to earn his father’s respect, George did exactly that, and then proceeded to transform the company into a behemoth. “He was always seeking the approval of his father,” Hank told me.

I asked Hank if the same was true of him. He answered instantly: “Every son seeks his dad’s approval, obviously.”

The image of George Steinbrenner, the huffing, puffing, half-mad micromanager, still lingers in the public imagination. But the reality is that under Steve Swindal (who ran the team from June 2005 until his recent fall from grace), the general manager of the Yankees, Brian Cashman, had virtually unfettered control over the team’s baseball operations and served as its primary spokesman to the press.

Hank wasted no time making it clear that this era had passed. Within days of the Yankees’ elimination from the playoffs last fall, he announced that he was going to insist that the team’s 22-year-old, lights-out middle reliever, Joba Chamberlain, be moved into the starting rotation this year. Hank has since been an almost constant presence in the papers, conspicuously overshadowing — and frequently undermining — Cashman as he held forth on, among other things, A-Rod, Torre and the team’s new manager, Joe Girardi. During the Johan Santana sweepstakes, hardly a day went by when Hank didn’t offer some reporter an update on the organization’s latest thinking about the Minnesota Twins pitcher.

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Hank unsuccessfully tried to trade Phil Hughes and other players for Johan Santana of the Twins.Credit
Nick Laham/Getty Images

“The fans want the Steinbrenners involved,” Hank told me this winter. Such a statement would have once been laughable — the announcement of his father’s ban from baseball in 1990 prompted a standing ovation at Yankee Stadium — but over the past decade or so, Yankee fans have come to see the Boss, and perhaps his children by extension, in a more favorable light. Whether the team was winning or not, he always put on a good show, and with his brashness, overconfidence and egomania, he seemed genetically engineered for New York. Most of all, even at his blustery worst, he always cared enough about winning to dump his profits from the Yankees back into the team. Still, it’s worth noting that the foundation of Joe Torre’s dynasty was built during the years of Steinbrenner’s ban, from 1990 to 1993. And today’s team, which includes a good deal of young, homegrown talent, was put together over the past few years, while Cashman was in charge.

Joe Girardi, who was fired from the Florida Marlins in 2006 after he clashed with the team’s owner — he was still named National League manager of the year after his one season with the Marlins — told me he has no problem working for active owners. “I think it’s a good thing that they care so much and that they want to be involved,” he said. “It shows their passion for the game.” (When I asked Hank about Girardi, he told me he was pleased to have a manager “with a little more fire in his belly” than Torre. “Baseball’s not as complicated as football, so I don’t know that a manager means as much in baseball as he does in other sports, but Girardi is a great leader.”)

Hank is certainly more knowledgeable about baseball than his father was when he bought the Yankees in 1973. During his Yankees apprenticeship in the mid-’80s, Hank worked closely with two veteran baseball men, the team’s G.M., Clyde King, and its head of scouting and player development, Woody Woodward. “I would say he has a natural feel for baseball, and I’ve been with plenty of owners over the years where that’s not the case,” recalls Woodward, who took Hank on scouting trips and educated him on the subtleties of the game.

Hank said he has no regrets about any of the strong statements he made during the off-season, including his swipe at the beloved Torre. On the contrary, he told me he felt obligated to speak up because no one else within the organization was doing so: “Everyone was hiding in their rooms. You can’t do that and be a leader. You have to step up and take a position.”

Yankee officials are obviously aware of Hank’s tendency to produce good copy, and seem eager to inoculate themselves by casting him as an asset rather than a liability. “Hank is very, very comfortable with the press and very secure in his knowledge of baseball,” Levine says. “And what he’s saying to the media isn’t inconsistent with Yankee policy.”

Team officials are also making a concerted effort to project a sense of continuity, treating the generational succession as an almost unnewsworthy event. They say Swindal was just a placeholder, that Steinbrenner Sr.’s unspoken intent was always to put his sons in charge of the Yankees, that the Boss himself is still involved in all of the major decisions. He’s simply taking a more hands-off approach, “like the chairman of any major company,” according to Levine, who described the transition from Swindal to the Steinbrenner children as “seamless.”

It’s unclear how much meaningful input Steinbrenner Sr. is providing these days, though. In the face of speculation about his declining health, the Yankees insist that he’s fine, yet at the same time keep him out of the public eye, which gives the whole situation a Wizard of Oz quality. (When I asked the family’s spokesman, Howard Rubenstein, for an interview with Steinbrenner, he offered to get me a written statement instead.)

Whatever Steinbrenner’s condition, there’s no getting around the significance of the changes under way. The Yankee organization is always hard to penetrate — it’s a multibillion-dollar company run almost like a small business — but Yankee insiders seem especially reluctant to talk about the team’s operations during this period of transition. The club’s limited partners are understandably loyal to Steinbrenner Sr., given how much he has increased the value of the franchise; the consensus among them is that he has earned the right to do whatever he thinks is best for the team. Still, they are watching things unfold and, you have to assume, will start agitating for changes, perhaps even a sale of the team, if they are unhappy with its direction under the next generation of Steinbrenners.

In the short term, the individual most likely to be affected by the changes is Brian Cashman, whose contract comes up at the end of the 2008 season. Before 2005, the Yankees’ G.M. was very much at the mercy of Steinbrenner Sr.’s whims, but after Steve Swindal’s accession, Steinbrenner made a point of endowing Cashman with the authority traditionally enjoyed by general managers. Given Cashman’s overall success to date, it seems safe to assume that the Yankees will try to keep him; the question is whether he’ll want to stay if he no longer has the power to shape the team. For now, Cashman isn’t saying anything about his plans — or, for that matter, about how his job has evolved under the new regime. “Some things are different, some things aren’t,” he told me when we spoke recently. “I’d rather not get into the specifics.”

The biggest issue the Yankees face is potential sibling rivalries, particularly between the two brothers, and Hank’s outspokenness has inevitably triggered speculation about the possibility of resentment. “Observing some of the things Hank has been saying, he has a disconcerting tendency to speak in the first-person singular,” one of the limited partners told me. “When George does that, that’s one thing, but when you’re in a situation where there’s a family transition going on, for one of four siblings to speak like that can produce issues.”

The interests of the brothers’ informal fiefdoms — business and baseball — will inevitably collide. Indeed, they already have in the case of Johan Santana, whom Hank seemed desperate to land. The Yankees offered Phil Hughes, Melky Cabrera and a mid-level prospect for the Minnesota Twins ace and set an early December deadline for a decision. The Twins stalled, and Hank continued to press the negotiations until he was ultimately talked out of making a deal by both Hal, who had financial concerns about Santana’s salary, and Cashman, who was reluctant to part with so many prospects.

Hank made no secret of the fact that he was the most aggressive advocate of acquiring Santana, and the very public manner in which he handled the organization’s internal deliberations over the trade could certainly come back to haunt the Yankees. If the young prospects disappoint, it will be clear who is at fault, and Hank seems to be reserving the right to assign blame. “I don’t want to make it seem like I’m going to be ranting and raving like my father used to do, but everybody seems so sure that we’re going to be O.K., and these guys are still rookies,” he told me. (It won’t help matters if Santana, who was eventually traded to the Mets, thrives in New York.)

If resentment does surface between Hank and Hal, their father will be at least partly responsible. He had years to prepare a succession plan, but like so many successful family-business leaders, who tend to feel an especially powerful sense of ownership, he had a hard time letting go. From time to time he talked about “letting the young elephants into the tent,” as he put it, yet at the end of the day — at least until Steve Swindal emerged — he always kept the flaps tightly closed. What’s more, Steinbrenner Sr. pitted Hank and Hal against each other with comments like the ones he made to Sports Illustrated in 2004 and presumably created the current Darwinian arrangement in which they are both “equal partners” in the business.

The Yankees organization clearly recognizes the precariousness of this power-sharing arrangement. After I interviewed Randy Levine, he called Rubenstein to express concern that my story was going to focus too much on Hank. And without any prompting, Jennifer told me how well her two brothers were working together: “They’re complementing each other perfectly. Together they’re just clicking.”

However things play out among the Steinbrenner siblings, however tempting it may be for Yankee haters to indulge in dark, King Lear-like fantasies of family discord tearing apart the Yankee kingdom, it’s worth remembering that the franchise has almost always been a model of dysfunction under the Steinbrenners. And there’s no denying that, for now, the state of the Yankees appears strong. They have a good mix of young talent like Hughes, Chamberlain, Ian Kennedy and Robinson Cano, along with battle-tested veterans like Jeter, Mariano Rivera and Jorge Posada, and they have ensured that the best player in baseball, Alex Rodriguez, will never play for anyone else.

For his part, Hank betrays no worry about the competition in the American League, whether it’s the Cleveland Indians, who eliminated the Yankees last year; the Detroit Tigers, who added Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis this winter; or, above all, the Red Sox, who have not only won the World Series twice in the last four years but are arguably becoming a national phenomenon. “Red Sox Nation?” Hank says. “What a bunch of [expletive] that is. That was a creation of the Red Sox and ESPN, which is filled with Red Sox fans. Go anywhere in America and you won’t see Red Sox hats and jackets, you’ll see Yankee hats and jackets. This is a Yankee country. We’re going to put the Yankees back on top and restore the universe to order.”

as manager after saying of Steinbrenner and Reggie Jackson: “The two of them deserve each other. One’s a born liar. The other’s convicted.”

October 18 The Yankees win the World Series for the first time since 1962 after Reggie Jackson hits three home runs in Game 6.

August 23 Steinbrenner pleads guilty to making illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon and several Democrats. (He is suspended from baseball for 15 months and is later pardoned by President Reagan.)

January 3 A group led by George Steinbrenner buys the Yankees for $10 million. He pledges to be a hands-off owner: “I’ve got enough headaches with my shipping business.”

Correction: March 1, 2008

An article on Page 40 of Play magazine this weekend about the shift in control of the Yankees from George Steinbrenner to his sons misstates the number of years Mr. Steinbrenner has owned the team. It is 35, not 30.

Jonathan Mahler is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning.” His next book, “Hamdan v. Rumsfeld,” will be out in August.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MM38 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Oedipus Bronx. Today's Paper|Subscribe